Can someone who's more green fingered than me tell me is this is giant hogweed please? It's all over one of our fields, so if it is I'll need to get someone in to get rid of it. Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment . Can someone who's more green fingered than me tell me is thi...

“The Campo di SS. Giovanni e Paolo, Venice,” by Bernardo Bellotto, via the National Gallery of Art . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure and industrial technology. This week we look at homes being built on top of libraries, Patriot missile manufacturing, an effort to construct new US coal plants, a tunnel between the US and Russia, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subs...

Approaching a junction, I looked up to the sky and saw a hole in the clouds unlike any I have seen before. I usually look up to the stone that must be at least a hundred years old: to the grey buildings – homes – in which I see so many stories. But today the blue sky and the white cloud stood out; the life of the city is made as much in Nature as it is in architecture. I was on my way to a coffee shop, one I frequent because every time I go it is quiet. Classical music plays in the backgroun...

In 1980, Intel released the Intel 8087 floating-point coprocessor, a chip that could make math up to 100 times faster. As well as arithmetic and square roots, the 8087 computed transcendental functions including tangent, exponentiation, and logarithms. But it all depended on a 69-bit adder: "The arithmetic heart of the floating-point execution unit is centered about a nanomachine comprised of the adder and its related registers, shifters and control circuitry," as the patent describes it. In t...

Apple FINALLY lets you turn on your Mac remotely , without having to press the power button. In the media, articles suggest it's a reaction to Mac mini power button complaints . While I agree the M4 mini's power button is in a really dumb spot, that's not why I care about this feature. The two bigger use cases for me have been a pain for years: Apple FINALLY lets you turn on your Mac remotely , without having to press the power button. In the media, articles suggest it's a reaction ...

Hello, It's Friday again Flipping more things Klonan After we introduced the concept of flipping back in 1.1 ( FFF-364 ), it became more and more annoying to have certain entities prevent flipping. While some things will always be impossible (Train stops, Rail signals, etc.), we do what we can. Pumpjack The Pumpjack was always a touch strange with the rotations, maybe it was adding to the puzzle, but these days we are more of the opinion it is just making things more awk...

When you see AI model pricing pages, you usually see things broken down like this: Model Context Length Max CoT Tokens Max Output Tokens Input Price (Cache Hit) Input Price (Cache Miss) Output Price deepseek-chat 64K - 8K $0.07 / 1M tokens $0.27 / 1M tokens $1.10 / 1M tokens deepseek-reasoner 64K 32K 8K $0.14 / 1M tokens $0.55 / 1M tokens $2.19 / 1M tokens Source: DeepSeek API Docs If you manage to have most of your input tokens be cached, you save a huge amount, in...

There are two ways to look at the P v NP problem, as a formal mathematically defined conjecture as a Clay Millennium Prize Problem, and as the more intuitive notion that everything efficiently verifiable is efficiently computable and the implications that has on our ability to compute. I've written considerably about how artificial intelligence has affected the latter. In particular, how AI and other advances in computing have brought us to this Optiland of getting most of the good implicati...

The Pyodide 314.0 release announcement (via Hacker News ) includes news I've been looking forward to for a long time: You can now publish Python packages built for Pyodide (or any Python runtime compatible with the PyEmscripten platform defined in PEP 783 ) directly to PyPI and install them at runtime. Previously, the Pyodide maintainers had to maintain, build, and host over 300 packages ourselves. This created a significant burden on our maintainers and became a major bottleneck for t...

Recently I came upon Pluggy , a Python library for developing plugin systems. It was originally developed as part of the pytest project - known for its rich plugin ecosystem - and later extracted into a standalone library. You're supposed to reach out for Pluggy if you want to add a plugin system to your tool or library and want to use something proven rather than rolling your own. In this post I will share some notes on how Pluggy works, and will then review how it aligns with the fundame...

There is a bit of schadenfreude on Twitter right now about Anthropic being hit by the US government’s export control directive to suspend access to Fable and Mythos . Anthropic and their leadership have spent a lot of time and effort describing its own technology as dangerous and in need of strict controls and regulation. Now that the US government appears to have taken that framing seriously and told them to turn it off for foreign nationals I can see why people are making fun of that situ...

At this moment, a spacecraft is headed from Earth to Europa, an ice-veiled moon of Jupiter thought to contain an ocean similar in some ways to one of our own. NASA engraved a metal plate affixed to the spacecraft with a poem, commissioned from Ada Limón during her time as poet laureate of the United States. It reads, in part: And it is not darkness that unites us, not the cold distance of… Source At this moment, a spacecraft is headed from Earth to Europa, an ice-veiled moon of Jupiter tho...

tl;dr: If you earn considerable 1099 income in the US, report your business expenses to the IRS. Federal Income Tax Tariffs funded most US government spending until 1913. 0% 25% 50% 75% 100% 1850 1900 1950 2000 Customs Excise Corporate Individual Payroll Other The composition of US federal receipts, via census.gov and whitehouse.gov . After the 16th Amendment legalized federal income tax, Congress levied it via the 1913 Revenue Act: a 1% income tax on high-earne...

This article is Part 5 of my series on India’s launch vehicle crisis. A space program can only move as swiftly and flexibly as its orbital rockets, and India has been amid a grinding halt. As such, I’ve been focusing my  Indian Space Progress  blog & newsletter on fully exploring this situation before resuming coverage of national space activities at large. Part 1  of the article series  reviewed the state of India’s orbital launch vehicles , revealing a bleak picture of ambitious go...

All tests were executed against Kafka 4.3.0 using Dimster.  In the last post Broker-Visible vs Client-Local Parallelism we looked at two ways of scaling Kafka consumption. The final unit of parallelism can be visible to the broker, as consumers, or it can be local to the client, as threads, virtual threads, async tasks, or some other execution mechanism hidden behind a smaller number of consumers.  Broker-visible parallelism is simple to reason about: if each consumer processes records seria...

After five weeks in New Zealand, it was time for a change of scenery. Following my original plan and given the proximity, Australia was the obvious choice. However, I had to shorten my stay to reach Japan in time for the cherry blossoms. I decided to split the next two weeks between Melbourne and Sydney. I was also looking forward to finally slowing down and staying more than 1–2 nights in the same place (or so I thought 😅). Just a few days before my arrival, Melbourne was named the "...

Your screens, chair, and desk shape how you read the market and how your back feels after six hours at the open. A good trading desk setup keeps charts, news, and order entry within a glance while keeping you out of pain. The seven ideas below cover different budgets, room sizes, and trading styles, from a single ultrawide to a full monitor wall. Pick the one that matches how you actually trade. Top 7 Trading Desk Setup Ideas Triple-Monitor Command Center Three screens...

When I open a link, say on Hacker News, and I see a blog post or a GitHub README obviously written by AI, I feel a few things. I feel offended, because it’s like I’ve been tricked, like the author thinks I’m a rube who won’t notice or mind. I feel sad at how common this experience is, how many people are happy to dump their sewage on the commons and sign their name on it. And I feel contempt for the author, because if you use AI to write, you are a waste of biomass. Let’s not mince wor...

Postgres 19 finally gives us a clean way to do read-after-write across replicas. Without it, here’s the problem: you write a row to the primary then you immediately read it back and that query goes to a replica but the replica hasn’t replayed the write yet, so you get stale data or nothing at all The usual workarounds are: sleep after the write and hope the replica caught up (terrible, don’t do it) pin the user to the primary for a few seconds or poll the replica until ...

It’s 11.35am, 27°, clear sky with only a few tiny little clouds here and there. I’m standing at the same parking spot where I ended the previous walk, and I’m about to tackle segment number 5 of this 10-part loop. Contrary to what I did up until this point, this time I’m gonna try something different: I’m going to write this post as I go, rather than writing it the following day. I’m typing this in a chat with myself, on Telegram. We’ll see how this goes. If I end up enjoying ...

These posts are Version 2 of this material. Please email me with feedback. Sex and Drugs and Guns and Code Restart A Little Psychology How We Got Here More Psychology When the Model is the Harm Privacy, Power, and the Self Who Gets What and Why Bibliography Bueno de Mesquita and Smith’s The Dictator’s Handbook was one of the inspirations for this series of posts. Their model of how people get and hold power isn’t as cynical as it first appears, and it helped me ...

Today we bid farewell to Ho Chi Minh City on our Vietnam 2026 trip for a couple of days to stay in Vũng Tàu on the coast. The small peninsula was a popular retreat for the French colonialists, and is famed within Vietnam for its seafood and large beach. HCMC has become so big that the Vũng Tàu is officially considered part of its metro area, but it still has its own distinct history, character, and charm. Before setting off, we had a salt coffee with condensed milk and a baguette from ...

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